Will Boeing 737 airliners be banned from flying?

The Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC) has revoked the type certificate of Boeing 737 aircraft. This means that the Federal Air Transport Agency may soon ban Russian airlines from using such aircraft. It is likely that the Federal Air Transport Agency will discuss this issue at a meeting with representatives of the International Aviation Committee and carriers, scheduled for November 6.

No, not automatically. As far as we can judge from a similar case in 2003 , only the Federal Air Transport Agency can prohibit Russian airlines from using this or that aircraft. Then the IAC revoked the type certificate of the Il-86 aircraft, considering it unsafe, but the State Civil Aviation Service (the structure that preceded the Federal Air Transport Agency) did not agree with the committee’s conclusions. In addition, most Russian airlines use leased aircraft registered in Bermuda. Pobeda Airlinesreported that its Boeings will continue to fly on the basis of a certificate issued by the Bermudian authorities.

The official reason is this: the IAC considers the elevator control system used on the Boeing 737 to be insufficiently reliable. Claims against this system could have arisen as a result of the investigation of the disaster that occurred on November 17, 2013 in Kazan - then a Boeing 737-500 VQ-BBN of Tatarstan Airlines crashed, killing 50 people. During the investigation, experts studied, among other things, the hydraulic elevator drives - the final report was prepared in April 2015, but has not yet been published. The IAC report states that the Federal Air Transport Agency has been trying for a year to negotiate with the US Federal Aviation Administration on urgent improvements to the elevator, but was not successful.

This will greatly affect Russian air travel. Boeing 737 is one of the most popular aircraft in Russia and in the world. The entire fleet of Pobeda Airlines consists of such airliners. This is the main aircraft for UTair - this carrier has 50 of them. Aeroflot has 12 such machines. If tomorrow all Boeing 737 airliners are banned from flying, this could hit not only the aviation industry, but also the entire Russian economy.